It is not a ponzi scheme because there is no centralized entity paying off later investors with earlier ones, but I would still not invest in it. Way better investments out there. Something can be a bad investment without being a ponzi scheme.

Thing is....it is until it isn't. The idea of a fully decentralized currency outside of the power of any Federal Reserve is incredibly exciting, it's no wonder the current PTB are attacking crypto with every angle they can think of. OTOH, the current high fluctuation in crypto prices make it worthless as a currency since nobody wants to be the guy that would have been a millionaire had he not paid bitcoin for a pizza 3 years ago.

The upshot of this whole situation is that many people outside of tech circles are now buying crypto as a form of lotto ticket, except when the dust settles, a bunch of people will be holding crypto that they want to use. It's possible the current gold rush will help crypto go mainstream.

Well, on a factual basis, he's wrong; it is not a pyramid scheme. (My one sentence summary is that it is the world's most wasteful casino.)

I like Maciej, but making factually incorrect claims is not helpful.

Rather than pyramid scheme, maybe history's biggest pump-and-dump scheme: an asset with dubious value (some bytes in a decentralized database) that's so staggeringly inefficient to run that the transaction fees are astronomical and speeds are glacial, and that nobody uses for any real purpose besides speculation - pumped by a million and one influencers and "coin news" sites parroting empty bullish propaganda in hopes the price of their portfolio keeps going up.

I was originally fascinated by crypto, but the more I've come to understand it the more I suspect the world has lost its mind.

“Guy had an opinion”

The algorithm to remove heated discussions from the frontpage works well actually. This post was quickly removed from it.

The fact that it is highly speculative and driven by speculation does not mean there is no value there. I believe the tech world will move to decentralization, and crypto currency will fuel this transition. If it is never used to buy a hot dog on the street that doesn’t mean it has no value. Building applications that put control into the users’ hands will become more important, and this is what cryptocurrencies are about. Yes, it is not delivering on the value it promises, but I believe it will. Invest at your own risk because it will take a while to get there and there will be many many ups and downs.

If Pinboard accounts had a market resale price, they wouldn’t be too different as earlier purchases drove up the price for future purchases, by design. However, Maciej operates Pinboard on a “proof of no developer work” scheme which is vastly more energy efficient.

(Joke!)

Complains about price of using crypto. There are many cryptos that don't have high fees like bitcoin. For example BCH. I pay for my drinks with BCH and the fee is negligible.

All social constructs are made up. Fiat cash doesn't have any value, gold doesn't have any value, bitcoin doesn't have any value, UNLESS the socially agreed upon norm for any of them is that it does. It's the same for any social construct - there are no countries, or borders, or monarchs or rulers, it's all just made up and agreed upon.

With a sufficiently broad definition of "pyramid scheme", everything is a pyramid scheme.

Power, ideology, or capital naturally organizes with some sort of gradient, and as more participants that enter into a system, it bolsters the authority of the system itself.

If you don't like power, ideology, or capital, pursue love and peace. Or my advice is to try all of the above.

Well, it does have blocks pulled into place by chains, so to speak ...

Why is it useful to burn energy mining? Because it mints a Bitcoin!

Why is Bitcoin of value? Because we burned energy mining it!

This circular argument is the supposed value proposition of Bitcoin.

maciej has good intentions but he's usually wrong. Gold must be a pyramid as well then, which is not wrong for a sufficiently narrow definition.

What is Pinboard and what does it have to do with Bitcoin?

It's really simple. Buy when everyone is fearful, sell when the euphoria and the crypto hype squad is everywhere.

Since this person fails to understand this in the crypto markets and many others who fell for the run up to 60K and it retraced backwards are the same ones crying 'scam' in 2018.

Learn to ignore the hype and sit at the bottoms when no one is taking interest like in March 2020.

So, judging by this guy's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Ceg%C5%82owski), it's somewhat obvious he's a stooge. But I don't think his point is terrible - in fact, I rather agree with its general strokes. Maybe that says something about me?

And the dollar isn’t?

One is backed by aircraft carriers and the force of law, the other is backed by math and an egregious amount of energy usage.

Don’t see how it precludes the ‘having value’ part of things.

A pyramid scheme implies there's future payments to be expected if one were to aggressively recruit people into the scheme. A Ponzi scheme implies there's a central orchestrator extracting value out of the scheme and keeping it functioning just well enough to maximize personal profits before it all crumbles down.

There's no such central authority with Bitcoin and there aren't further expectations of payment either- value fluctuates but you're always going to have the same amount of coin unless you personally do anything about it. If Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, then every penny stock is also a pyramid scheme.

I do wish these kind of posts that appeal to the lowest common denominator were less prevalent on Hacker News, as they're particularly found whenever there are big price swings so it's nakedly obvious what they're truly about.

The problem with Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies is that they are not actually used that much, at least not in western countries with good stable access to banks and credit cards and so on.

But this is not the entire world, it's not even the majority of the world. It is a pyramid scheme in the sense that those who invested first will gain the most but at the same time that is true for basically any technology.

If you "got in" early on the web and started creating websites for example the likelyhood that you will be successful increases with time. You learn what works and what doesn't, you get ahead of everyone else.

Just to be born earlier could make you rich, just buy a good domain name and sit on it. People like me born later wouldn't stand a chance. People who created websites early that solves really obvious stuff is hard to compete against just because they were early in a new tech.

I have huge respect for the pinboard guy but I am not really sure saying "Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme" is going to help anyone.